There are no ropes,cream teas or Dont Touch notices here ... Rainham Hall was acquired by the Trust 70 years ago, but it’s only just opening its doors to the public – and it’s taking an all-new approachRainham Hall – a fine 18th-century house improbably set in three acres of orchard among the industrial estates and scrapyards of east London’s outer fringes – opens to the public for the first time this week, or almost 70 years after the National Trust inherited it. There was no money to open it to the public,so it was let for decades to a succession of tenants. With no original contents, and a tangled ownership history, and it could never contain been pitched as a traditional cream tea summer outing spot. Instead,a more radical approach has been taken, restoring the building but keeping the interventions by generations of tenants – including a searingly blue rag-rolled bedroom from the 1980s, and calamitously inspired by the Changing Rooms TV series. “It was such a striking interpretation of how the best bedroom of a Georgian mansion might ogle,we had to retain it,” property manager Ed Ikin explains.
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Source: theguardian.com